Mass Effect: Lineage
by Orange Lantern Tsume
Summary: While looking around Shepard's room, Garrus discovers the shocking secret of her origins. FemShepGarrus. And no, I don't care about the official facts.
1. Chapter 1

Mass Effect: Lineage

AUTHOR: I hope this fic garners some attention...

Summary: While looking over Shepard's room, Garrus makes a startling discovery about her family origins. FemShepGarrus.

"Honestly, I had no idea she'd drink _that_ much!" Ashley Williams frantically explained to Garrus Vakarian as they quickly made their way down the _Normandy_'s corridors. "Believe me, I would have intervened if I'd had any idea—"

"It doesn't matter now," Garrus interrupted. He hefted his charge and continued walking. "We should get the commander to her quarters and make sure she'll be all right."

They went on in silence, Garrus carrying Jane Shepard, human Spectre extraordinaire. She was against his chest, arms around his neck and legs around his waist, mumbling drunken and child-like words into his ears.

As the trio moved through the _Normandy_, they were given a few surprised looks by various crewmen, though fortunately no one said anything. Just as they drew near Shepard's quarters, she shifted about abruptly, half-crying out "Not tired, Papa!" with the words slightly slurred.

Ashley froze, staring at her as Garrus gave Shepard a distracted pat on the back, saying, "There, there, everything's all right."

In truth, he wanted to put his commanding officer to bed and then go soak his head in boiling oil to get rid of the embarrassment of the entire situation.

They reached Shepard's quarters and Ashley quickly keyed in the entry code. Garrus strode in, carefully depositing the young woman in his arms onto the silken sheets. He turned to Ashley and said, "At least that's over with."

"What did you say to her outside?" Williams asked, giving him a curious look. "You were speaking turian."

Garrus blinked. "I was?"

Ashley nodded. "Yeah, and so was the commander. I should have expected her to pick up a few languages, since a lot of people tend to memorize basic phrases in case of emergency, but it took me completely by surprise."

Garrus thought for a moment before replying. "I wasn't even aware she was speaking turian. It just filtered through my mind in a kind of natural way, I think."

Ashley shrugged. "Well, at any rate, one of us will need to sleep with her."

If humans could tell when turians were blushing, Garrus would be incredibly obvious.

"Beg pardon?"

Ashley jerked a thumb at Shepard. "We need to make sure she doesn't vomit in her sleep while on her back, because she could drown in her own barf. I don't know about you, but I sleep like a log, so if the boss starts making noises, I might not hear her in time to help."

"Then why don't we get one of the others? Surely they would gladly accept such a task."

Ashley raised an eyebrow. "Are you dodging the question?"

Garrus reluctantly said, "If you must know, yes, I am a fairly light sleeper, so I could respond in case of emergency."

"Good. Of course, this also helps keep the matter low-profile. The crewmen that saw us aren't likely to talk, both for fear of damaging the commander's rep and because they probably don't think it's worth blabbing about. The others we shouldn't bring into this if we can help it, since we don't need them losing any trust in our fearless leader."

Garrus nodded. "I understand."

"Right, thanks," Ashley said, moving to the door. "Just so you know, you don't have to get naked with her or anything. Just keep her on her side so she doesn't drown in her own vomit."

Before the turian mechanic could say anything more, the gunnery chief exited the room, leaving Garrus alone with Shepard. He examined her: short, smooth red hair askew on the sheets, her skin glowing faintly in the subdued lighting, her perfectly-contoured body just lying there—

_Cut it out, Vakarian_, he thought sharply to himself. _She's your_ commanding officer, _not some paid harlot_.

Taking several calming breaths, he turned and strode to her shelves, forcing himself to peruse her collection of small framed photographs. Shepard kept the room impeccably tidy, placing only a modest amount of personal effects about. He recognized many as pictures of the crew of the _Normandy_, and several planets they'd visited (and even a few he didn't know).

However, one image piqued his curiosity: a group photo, apparently of a family.

Garrus took it in hand and peered at it. The picture showed a beautiful human woman, who looked strikingly like Shepard (her mother?); a small human girl of perhaps five, who had a massive smile on her face (Shepard, Garrus could tell); and—

Garrus felt his breathing stop.

The figure who _should_ have been the human man was, without a doubt, a _turian_ man.

Garrus blinked, shaking his head. _Stupid boy_, he chastised himself, _you're so stressed out that you've started seeing things in a dark room. Now be a grown-up and face reality_.

He kept the photo in-hand and went to the night stand, making sure to turn the lamp's light down so that he didn't accidentally wake his charge. Once illumination was granted, he held the photo under the light—

And once again, it became very hard to breathe.

Sure as the stars, a turian male was seated on the bench next to the human woman, his mandibles shifted in a turian version of a beaming smile. Child-Shepard was in his lap, and Garrus began to have a distinctive feeling that she was smiling all the more because she was in the turian's lap instead of the human's.

_What in blazes is this?_ Garrus wondered. _This photo had to be taken not too long after the Relay 314 Incident; such a picture is almost impossible to come into being!_

Frantically, even desperately, he flipped the frame around, popping the slide-lock on the back and removing the photo, hoping for evidence of a forgery.

But it was all too real, and when he saw the turian words there, clearly written for the male's young girl-child, he felt his blood go cold. The words the turian had written were no doubt indicating Shepard as the target audience, but the specific word choice made it all-too plain that Shepard wasn't just a friend's child, or adopted.

His muscles barely allowing motion, Garrus turned to stare in utter disbelief at the young woman he thought he knew.

_Commander, you're….turian? _

AUTHOR: I hope you've all enjoyed this. I'll update randomly, but this fic is most certainly not a one-shot.


	2. Chapter 2

Mass Effect: Lineage

AUTHOR: Yes, I have stories I haven't updated in forever (this far from being one of them). I'm inherently lazy and unfortunately very busy (slaving at school for good grades and at work to pay for my new car). I intend to update as much as I can in the next few weeks or months, but you have to be patient; I'm a real person with real problems and writing fanfiction takes a backseat to life. Thanks.

**Chapter 2 **

Garrus managed to put the picture back into the frame and set the item back in its place without smashing it to pieces. He kept checking the clock on the night stand; the minutes were going by faster than he realized.

It had to be his nerves. He was so rattled that he was having some kind of mental stutter; "morning" would come in no time and he'd be so sleep-deprived that he'd be dead on his feet and of little use to the _Normandy_.

_Get a_ better _grip, Garrus_, he mentally ordered. _The commander being half-turian isn't entirely proven; there is the possibility that perhaps her family was simply that tightly-knit_.

But he didn't really believe that. The explanation was too easy to fall back on. The turian language had a healthy amount of regional dialects, and perhaps the mysterious male had used a word that the standardized form didn't account for, a word that Garrus personally didn't know…but that just felt like a flimsy explanation to a clear-cut case.

_Oh, what does it matter, anyway? Commander Shepard being a hybrid, assuming that's true, doesn't change things in the greater scheme of the universe. You're still expected to obey orders and do your regular—and sometimes irregular—legwork around the ship and on missions. You need to accept the situation, keep silent about it, and just go about things as always_.

He didn't really want to, though.

He resumed staring at Shepard, the gears in his mind turning slowly and methodically. Bit by bit, the old stories and medical reports he'd gotten hold of floated up into his mind from the dark mental recesses that they'd fallen or been banished to: Discouraged fiction in limited publication about turian adventurers meeting new species out in the stars and having lurid relationships, and the heavily-promoted medical pamphlets asserting that turians could not successfully interbreed with other species (those same pamphlets making the rounds after the Relay 314 Incident, when turian had first met man; naturally, the racy stories had returned in full force due to that).

He had been a few years too young to really grasp everything the stories had been about—he hadn't yet studied interpretive art and literature in his classes—so he was clueless as to the deeper moral and spiritual facets of the tales; he had only thought of them as marvelous journeys beyond the solar system, encountering strange new life that seemed both astounding and crazy at once.

Later, when he'd grown up some more, he had taken his very, very secret collection of a few of the stories and destroyed them. By then, he had studied more about the medical side of things and had listened some to the government's propaganda and decided that the stories were just stories, not hopes or dreams or soul-spun desires.

After he started his C-Sec career, he realized that maybe destroying the stories had been a very rash decision; the couples on the Citadel certainly attested to interspecies romance and while he never heard of any of them knocking the other up, the feelings the lovers expressed made him mourn for his lost collection. Oh, he still could summon up small passages from the stories, but he couldn't read them again in their entireties, and that upset him; he very much wanted to discover new worlds and fall in love with fascinating aliens unlike himself.

He wanted to _be_ those stories, damn it all.

Reluctantly, he left Shepard's quarters, silently making his way down the corridors, intent on finding the ship's doctor and ferreting out some answers that he was afraid he already knew.


End file.
